The march south
by Off the rails
Summary: The world has ended and people are fighting over the scraps. Let me know what you think and maybe I'll post the rest.


**March south – fire in the night – watching the road with stolen eyes – the gates**

SIX walked in single file, stumbling irregulars veering down a crumbling weed-strewn road. The silent procession bled from hills to the north, dressed in stolen, soiled rags. Imperceptible among thick thorn bushes and knee-high dying summer grass the group pressed ahead down the arterial route towards the coast. Brush and saplings native and alien had long since erupted through the abandoned tarmac.

Tickner called a halt at a bend in the road where there stood the charred metal shells of cars, piled into barricades by people many years before. Behind the improvised stockade stood a tumble-down shop front and forecourt reclaimed by nature. A cat stalked beneath the flat roof of the partially collapsed roof top.

No maps were needed for the journey, in truth few still existed, they'd been ordered simply south of the old capital, just march south, it's barely 60 miles was the order. A journey that should have taken days had now cost the men a week and three lives. At the head of the ragged column Tickner stood removing his mask and goggles, he cast a sorrowful glance between the hills to the north. Smoke rose beyond a bluff in still-born mockery of the group's shambling progress. Set thick and stubborn against the grey-scale dusk, the monotone fingers wound about in a familiar breathless sky, thrusting like an acrid clematis probing for light in a depressed landscape. The group panted but were otherwise silent.

Nine men had begun the march, six remained to attempt the finish of it. But the portentous vapours brought with them a new threat. Tickner paced clutching his mask in his right hand, he shifted his weight, eyeing the skyline. The group cast faint linear shadows to the west dissected by his moving reflection. He strode back several yards towards the pillar of grey holding his attention three miles hence.

In pause the man stood astride a rent in the surface of the road, in which lay the desiccated remains of a child. Between Tickner's feet in the shallow grave were the bleached bones and crushed fontanelle of a boy no more than two years old. His skin stretched thin where it remained, patches of taught leather over a shell of splintered white. A permanent grimace.

Through a scope raised to his right eye the man watched the smoke looking for its cause. It hung now above a copse of oak saplings hemmed by an out-of-place subsided sandbag wall, a small grass bank in front of the wall was littered with wreckage. The smoke, rising from the skeletal ruin of a barn and lumber yard long since stripped of resource, repulsed his sullen comrades, their eyes fixed in a downwards gaze and their arms palsied at their sides. He detected no sign of movement. Replacing the black scope in improvised webbing made of fishing net Tickner turned to face the exhausted men. Off the road, growled the bow-legged captain.

From beyond the hills between the group and the smoking ruin a pneumatic throb erupted to break the malaise. Tickner had already reversed course, striding south he swung his good arm round to grasp the white linen mask which hung from his aching shoulder. Blood ran from the torn sleeve above his left hand and the arm, swollen and discoloured, could been seen and smelled through the ruined material of what was a water-proof workman's jacket.

As one the group shuffled past the twisted wall of broken cars and struck out westward heading for a forest that crested another dark hill. The men rested at the crown of the rise overlooking the road and resolved to make camp. Huddled in the remains of a stone building whose purpose none could tell Tickner ordered a fire built back at the road to throw off any pursuit.

Khan scrambled through thickets and brambles, along animal tracks and over rusted barbed wire, fondling in the dark for the crumbling tarmac.  
Between three stone obelisks, pock-marked and weathered, spanning the dilapidated road Khan set to building the diversionary fire. A pack of wild dogs barked in the distance and night owls gossiped. Standing back in the heat of his creation Khan scratched at the welts on his forearm. Inspecting the seeping wounds and enjoying the rare warmth. He relished the scent of petrol in his nostrils aware of nothing but the crackling roadside detritus.

No lights showed to the south and the threat from the north seemed distant and imagined as he started out for the base of the hill among leaping shadows and the sizzle of accelerant. The group spent an uncomfortable night amongst rusted iron roofing sheets and jagged breeze block, few slept and those that did tossed fitfully through the small hours.

Back at the road Tickner, huge hands dangling at his side, kicked at the cooling embers between the obelisks, he toed the blackened remains of the night's bonfire, considering a splintered rib under his boot.

No sign of movement or of life in that place. The sun had risen but the morning was black and cold. Khan's body lay naked, folded prone among the grass and litter at the roadside. His wrists were bound by rough cord and his eyes stared wildly as they hung from a twisted bramble limb nearby. They swung in the breathless morning, pendulums of aqueous fluid. Kicking the corpse on to its side Tickner noted to his companion that the man's genitals had been removed. Without discussion they heaved Khan into a ditch beyond a barbed wire fence to their right. The eyes were left for the birds.

The rest of the group emerged from the foliage to Tickner's left. Without word the five pressed on southward. Six miles on and the road suffused with the flattened terrain thereabouts and the stubborn tarmac gave way to gravel and shale. They trudged this strange midden born of decades of demolition on the outskirts of what once could have been a vibrant city. The shale thickened to impassable rubble as the men pressed on heading for the gates. Rocks sat blasted apart as if rendered by lightning or mortar fire and at intervals corpses emerged from the grass, clinging to boulders like shadows their clothes collapsing inwards over crushed rib cages.

Tickner called a halt as he rifled the remains of a man in a terminal crouch at the base of a blackened tree stump. Removing a handful of long-stale tobacco for the man's pocket and handing it back to the group he took the man's shoes before tossing those back along the line. The barefoot corpse receded from view as the last of the five turned to face the long rise to the gates.

Alongside the hulking shell of a fire station walked a solemn procession in ranks of three or four abreast. Chanting they passed Tickner and his men. Each silhouetted against drab concrete and naked from the waist up. With knowing eyes set forward in bald, pitted skulls the men walked to a single and constant drum beat. Their flesh scored and broken and covered in dancing crimson shadows set to movement by flickering tallow candles held aloft against a growing darkness. This murmuring company filed past the five without a sideways glance, perhaps two dozen unarmed men receding into the dusk.

The five crouched beside a shelled wall to the north east of the station's remains watching the last of the monks moving out of view. Tickner sketched a rudimentary map in the mud with a thick forefinger, then checked the rusted steel mechanism of his bow. He spat on the ground in front of him. The group's arrival had not gone unheralded and fractured faces peered from behind what shards of glass remained in windows along the main drag towards the centre of town. At intervals ragged children put forth from the carcass buildings that thronged the route in to the heart of the city. A cripple pawed one of the five as they passed by, and fell to solitude once more.

The threat of pursuit forgotten the five pushed forwarded looking for the settlement. With an escort of grubby faces and bare feet the men stumbled out into a flat valley clearing stretching for several miles in every direction.

Across the plain marched yet more bare chested men, this time being led in procession by a woman. Her flayed skin raw and bleeding, she turned, entirely naked, to face the arrivals. A guttural shriek, at once halted her legates and terrified the five, whose atavistic escorts had melted in to the rubble at the edges of the clearing. The woman stood now before Tickner whose good arm strove to raise his rusting weapon. The woman, tall and muscled and fierce, wearing twists of barbed metal weaved into her knee length hair moved towards the tense captain. The smell of iron smelt and bloody iodine thick about her as she stood looking up at the newly arrived leader. Cold eyes briefly resplendent in recognition.

No words passed between the two and Tickner stood as if paralysed, bow-legs stretching the soiled denim of his dungaree bottoms, she slowly took his bow away and his companions were similarly disarmed. Rifling hands of the half-naked monks who now surrounded the men eased the weapons free. The monks, bloody from unknown trials swayed among the five, candles casting the only light. Tickner removed his goggles, placing them in his webbing. He struck the woman's face and she fell, his bow thudding to the floor. Fresh blood mingled with the scarring and coagulation about her chin she stared through matted and metallic throngs about her face, caked in sweat and spittle.

She knelt now poised, cocked like the arm of his bow in readiness. Tickner thought of their years together far to the north and noticed how sick the smell of her had made him. The punch had felt good. One of the five, a young man with little speech called Hailes, had in terror vomited at the feet of a monk who engrossed in chanting failed to notice. The monk's skin was blistered, seeping. The priestess glared at Hailes and spat at the insult. He recoiled and sat uneasily in the mud, overcome by shortness of breath. The chanting monk still none-the-wiser. Tickner nodded to a companion who rested on his heels alongside the troubled man, now ashen grey.

Without much further in the way of negotiation the two parties moved out across the plain. Mud at intervals crunchy under foot being littered with blasted gravel and broken glass. The monks trod assiduously in bare feet. All was pain, all was blood and filth in that place. But the five had orders, so Tickner pressed on forcing his men onwards by strength of will.

Beneath his oversize cycle helmet Hailes had begun to sweat profusely and was now falling behind as the ground approached an oval rise to the east. Atop the improvised revetments were towers of corrugated iron listing heavily and lit from inside by more tallow candles. Figures could be seen even in this low light and shouts from inside the mud and metalled walls drifted down across the valley floor. Twin columns of smoke rose above the camp from cook fires at its centre. The group passed through a guarded tunnel in the southerly wall.

Dark, wet and sinister were the environs of the village, a ramshackle fortification overlooking the cleared valley of glass and rubble. The walls stood manned by spear-men wrapped in oiled cloth and ill-fitted get-ups of such peculiarity, to older eyes comical. The air hung close inside the walls and the ground itself seemed to reek. The naked priestess shuffled forward through the men and the filth to a wooden plinth outside a row of tarred wood huts. She stood and addressed Tickner's men.

Her name is Divine and this is her home, all are welcome. The bristling arms atop the steel and iron tipped walls were far from welcoming. She implored her guests to dine and rapped in a lyrical speech few recognised, throwing her hands skywards and shaking with conviction. Tickner watched pained by her transformation and exited by her apparent degradation. She'd been quite plain at one time, long ago it seemed to him now. The monks had piled the five's weapons about the priestess on the plinth and she spat now as she sang.

A corrupted hymn to a God that could not possibly be present in this time, in this place. At length, after much gyration and proclamation Tickner interrupted. The captain said we're tired now priestess, we came for food, now let us eat. Dance on your own time. The monks bristled at this and spear-men beat on the listing walls. For the first time she could remember the priestess smiled, and fell lightly from the plinth.  
For two days the men rested, cloistered from the people of Camp B, drinking a pale and sweet wine made at the coast by unseen workers and eating oaten cakes and fresh meat hunted from surrounding hills. The priestess took little interest in them as they planned their onward journey on cots of wicker and mattresses of sodden feather. Tickner dined with the woman, steadfastly naked at all times of day, save for her crown of barbs. The pair appeared comfortable in each other's company, though they disappeared for hours at a stretch, the only sign of occupation from the priests quarters a thin line of yellow smoke above her hearth.

She thinks she's Jesus Hailes muttered as the Turn landed in front of the men. I ain't seen no naked woman Jesus afore replied his former cell mate. I don't like her, she's got the devil in her and that's for starters, she'd kill us where we stood apart from Tick. Play your hand and shut up the cell mate proffered. Hailes was shivering and coughed productively, newly stricken by a familiar fever. The three men played cards all night, not realising the lack of spades in the deck, and fell to an uneasy sleep, two in cots and one among mud and hay on the floor. Tickner did not return that night. He stood atop the walls and talked in whispers with spear-men. Scouts reported smoke from all sides of the old city, they told. Threats beyond the valley unknown in number.

Hailes stumbled from the dormitory half-blind in the early morning dark of the rain-soaked camp. Skirting the row of huts he fondled looking for an outhouse or bathhouse or somewhere to wash. He vomited again, wandering if he was ill or just sick from drink. He urinated against a rubbish pile built towards the outside wall of the camp and turned to make his way back to his cot. Out of the blindness flashed the face of the priestess, all blood and scar ridges, each detail seeded now forever in his mind, growing like a cancer. His legs buckled.

A monk found him face down in the mud at dawn's first light. Hailes spoke no more. Tickner, busy in preparations, came to visit him the following day and found him unconscious, sweating and breathing in shallow bursts.  
Is he to die? The captain asked the priestess. She glowered and left the room, he's ill what can a woman do? Tickner whispered encouragement to the boy, emptied the room of valuables and locked the door behind him. If it's plague we all die, if it's her then he's dead already, he told the men at the threshold waiting for news. Hailes was consigned to his fate alone in a cot of wicker on a mattress of fetid feathers. His tortured dreams filled with that cruel face.

During the three days at the settlement a young monk called Acea had been assigned to assist Tickner in his preparations. But the 18-year-old boy had known nought but life at camps such as this and tyrants such as Divine. He bargained with Tickner in the shadows at prayer times and paid for passage using stolen treasures of the camp. A gas lamp, a polished flint knife and a dog-eared book of unknown origin. The captain had no idea how to affect Acea's removal from the camp but knew it must be done soon. Acea was introduced to the remaining men. Hailes' lay dead or dying in his cot behind a locked door. Tickner performed an inventory and planned to leave to following day.

The camp lay still save watchmen at the walls. Behind the locked door her callused fingers slid up Hailes' chest, rhythmically matching the shallow and laboured breathing. As the priestess knelt over his stricken form her sodden jet black hair hung down over his face. The prone man's eyes stayed shut. Two dirty thumb nails pressed hard into his throat but the young man made no sound as his breath failed. She leant forward and bit into the lifeless face before her. Divine kicked her head back gyrating atop the corpse. Before she could turn at the sudden noise of the door she was struck clean off the bed. Fixed to the mud floor with a bolt through her breast she slumped. Haile's body hung limply over her, draped like cloth. Tickner prowled across the room swinging his bow and casually eyeing the fresh pair of corpses clinging together in their eternal melancholy. Divine's eyes cold and lifeless were fixed, her mouth agape in a final curse. The bolt had punctured her heart. Wrapping the pair in Hailes' stained bed clothes and emptying the priestess' wine on to the heap he set them ablaze with the cot-side candle.

Spear-men from around the camp, and flayed monks rushed to and fro pulling buckets from a well to douse the hut fire that was spreading across the southerly wall of the camp. All was chaos. The fire threatened to topple the southerly wall. Screams went up as the priestess was pulled charred and smoking from the shell of Hailes' hut. The pair still locked in a grotesque embrace.

Acrid smoke rose all morning. Tickner and his men escaped in the melee but could see and hear the attempts to save the camp. As they crossed the bleak valley floor a single horn sounded to the north. Inside the camp fire fighters rushed to the defences. Tickner and his men watched from the valley floor as a host of black figures swept towards the camp and seemed to spring towards the walls, the air thick with spears, smoke twisting and laying close to the ground. A shroud of black and grey setting fast as the morning waned. Tickner thumbed the bolt in his bow and moved off. Acea at his heels, still naked from the waist up. Five again, they pressed onwards leaving the camp to its fate.


End file.
